Friday, May 4, 2012

Go: For a Winning Anarchist Strategy

by

Roy Jovana

Written in Fall 2010 for a local anarchist Go meetup in Seattle. Thanks to everyone for your feedback.A year later, after the Arab Spring, after the American Autumn,
who would have guessed the hint of potential in the air would have
exploded so abruptly and raised so many questions about our strategy
going forward?

Throughout history, people have joined together to fight exploitation
and injustice. A thread of resistance can be traced from ancient
Egyptian slave revolts to the WTO protests in Seattle, continuing in our
present day struggles. Though we’ve had setbacks and losses over the
millennia, we’ve also made many gains. As the powerful have adapted
their strategies and tactics to hold onto their power and influence,
we’ve been successful when we have also adapted, building on and
learning from past successes and failures.

The game of Go is another struggle for power and influence, a
strategic game where opponents try to expand and hold onto their areas
of power and use them to limit the other’s. We can learn from and apply
strategies from the game of Go to adapt and make our struggles more
effective.

21st Century Anarchism
With the failure of authoritarian communism and the recent petering
out of the anti-globalization movement, the 21st century is a time for a
new beginning. Just as in 1910 few people could have predicted the
upheavals that lay in store for them, this century will no doubt bring
times where the unthinkable, impossible future suddenly becomes an
undeniable present. This changing battle requires us to develop new
strategies and abandon failed ideologies—without mindlessly reenacting
past battles, but also without each generation starting anew and
rejecting history. Instead, we need to develop a strategy of
challenging power, honestly applying lessons from past resistance to the
realities of our present day struggles.

In all the work we do, we need strategies for campaigns such as
tenant/landlord and workplace struggles or fights targeting other
institutions. We also need to connect these campaigns to large-scale,
longer-term strategies and ultimately to a strategic framework for the
entire revolutionary project of overthrowing the ruling class and
establishing a free, just, and equal society.
In developing these strategies, we must remember that theory not
grounded in practical struggle is sterile and useless, while action
without strategy and reflection is an ineffective dead-end. This
requires that we refuse to let our political ideology color our
practical judgment. We must not believe that a tactic will be effective
simply because we would like it to be or because our ideology tells us
that it must be.

Instead, we must look at the playfield honestly, judging the
strengths and weaknesses of ourselves as well as our adversaries. As
the struggle unfolds, we must analyze the effectiveness of tactics based
on direct experience. And to be effective, we must train ourselves and
others to have the skills necessary to achieve our objectives including
strategic thinking skills.

The Game of Go
Centuries before written history, a game was invented to help the
Chinese aristocracy practice strategic thinking. This game is now
commonly referred to as “Go”, from the Japanese name, or “Wei Qi,” the
modern Chinese name, meaning literally, “the surrounding game.” Based
on simple rules that have changed little over thousands of years, Go is a
complex game. The style of play has constantly changed, with expert
players building on the lessons from past players and constantly
analyzing current and past games for insights into new strategies.

So what is the game of Go? Go is played on a board with a 19×19 grid
(13×13 or 9×9 for beginners). Two players take turns placing black and
white Go “stones” on the intersection points on the grid. Once placed,
the stones cannot be moved. Each point has between two and four
“liberties,” represented by the lines leaving the point. A stone with
one or more liberty or connected to stones of the same color with
liberties is considered “alive.” If a player fills in the liberties of
their opponent’s stone, that stone is “captured” and is removed from the
board. But capturing is not the most important aspect of the game. At
the end of a game, each player will have surrounded different parts of
the board in a way that their stones cannot be captured. These
surrounded portions of the board are their “territory”; the larger
determines the winner.

Go As a Revolutionary Tool
But Go is more than just a game. It can be a valuable tool for
developing revolutionary anarchist strategy. Go has lasted for
thousands of years because it is the boiled-down essence of real
strategy, simple enough to move beyond transitory historical details,
instead reflecting many general strategic concepts. At the same time,
it is not so simple as to be irrelevant to real-world strategic problem
solving. This allows us to map complex real-world problems to Go
concepts and to use Go techniques to see fundamental strategic flaws or
strengths. Go provides a language and a framework for discussing core
strategic and tactical issues.

Compared with other games, we can see why Go can map better to real
world struggles. In chess, the goal is to corner and kill the
opponent’s king. In modern struggles, whether war between nations,
political power battles, labor struggles, or the revolutionary struggle
in general, opponents never have a single head or point of power.
Instead, their power is determined by their political, economic,
military, or social influence, and this power can change dramatically
over time. These different spheres of influence can be mapped to points
on a Go board, with success being determined by expanding territory.
Capture can be important, but more as a tactic to gain territory than as
an end in itself.

In the book, The Protracted Game: A Wei-Ch’i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy,
Scott A. Boorman presents one such mapping. The edges of the board
correspond to the lowest caste of peasants in feudal China. Towards the
center, points correspond to higher positions in the social caste
system, with the very center being the urban political class. While
other factions fought directly for the single center point, Mao used the
standard Go strategy of building territory first in the isolated
corners, then along the edges. While others focused on one point, Mao
and the communists focused on building territory, ultimately dominating
the board.

For our purposes, a less precise mapping is likely to be more useful,
just enough to provide a bridge between Go strategic concepts and the
practical issue we’re addressing.

Go Proverbs
One of the ways that Go strategy has been passed down from generation
to generation is in the form of simple proverbs. Each proverb
summarizes a technique or idea. They are meant to suggest likely good
moves but are not to be followed blindly. Once you start using Go to
think about strategy, you will find that many Go proverbs can give
insight into our struggles.

Lose Your First Fifty Games as Quickly as Possible
One such proverb for beginners is “lose your first 50 games as
quickly as possible.” Many beginners play slowly, over-analyzing their
moves, but with no experience to draw on. Rather than playing quickly
and learning from their mistakes, they are stuck in a paralysis that
prevents them from gaining the experience they need. The fact is that
if you don’t know what you are doing, you will lose. The important thing is to learn from it, and not take risks larger than you are willing to lose.

Don’t Throw an Egg at a Wall
Another that is especially relevant for anarchists, almost literally,
is “don’t throw an egg at a wall.” This Korean proverb is more
commonly known as “play away from thickness” and cautions against
playing stones too close to your opponents’ strength, as well as playing
a useful distance away from your own strength. In Go, if your opponent
has a strong wall that you have no hope to cut or capture, playing
close to the wall guarantees the capture of your stone and actually
strengthens your opponent. The same can be said for misguided
anarchists tossing an egg against a wall of riot cops only to be knocked
to the ground and arrested. The converse is also true: playing too
close to your own strong group is a wasted “safe” move that does little
to gain territory.

Strengthening Your Own Weak Group Makes Your Opponent’s Weaker
Stating the strategic advantage of solidarity is the proverb
“strengthening your own weak group makes your opponent’s weaker.” When
targeting your opponent’s weakness for attack, your own weaknesses
expose you to counter attack. If you can strengthen them first, your
attack will be more successful. In the labor movement, this lesson
appears when you have divisions in your ranks, with vulnerable workers
exposed to attack. If you can strengthen the vulnerable workers before
the fight, the boss will have less ability to fight back, ultimately
making your offensive more successful.

Connecting Groups
A core strategy in Go is to start in the corners and edges, and then
jump out to the center to connect separate groups of stones. It is
easiest to create solid territory in the isolated corners. Next,
territory can be made on the edges—but it is more difficult. Finally,
especially if a group of your stones is weak, jumping out to the center
can allow them to connect with others, increasing the chances for
survival. As in the previous proverb, connecting your weak groups
strengthens them, putting them in a better position to attack their
common foe.

In the real world, small isolated groups, like weak groups of stones
on the board, must establish a base or coordinate with other groups to
survive and be effective. A base is an organizational and social
network capable of sustaining itself in spite of attacks and setbacks.
In addition to being self-sustaining, the network would allow expanding
the fight to new territory. But even with a solid base, there is a risk
of “living small”, or staying isolated with just enough structure and
support to keep going but with no ability to go on the offensive.
Keeping groups connected and working together can prevent this.

In the real-world this could apply to many situations, connecting
groups across race and gender lines, connecting a variety of groups in
the same city where struggles intersect such as class struggle and
environmentalist groups targeting the same corporation, or connecting
demands such as feminist groups endorsing labor struggles for shorter
work hours and childcare benefits.

A Poor Man Must Pick Quarrels
One proverb that is especially interesting in light of the
asymmetrical nature of our fight is “a rich man should not pick
quarrels.” The parallel is that if you are a poor man, then you should
most certainly pick quarrels. As you play a game, if you notice that
you are well ahead of your opponent in territory, you will want to avoid
complicated fights and instead solidify your gains. Meanwhile, if you
are behind and playing safe moves that solidify the status quo, you are
bound to lose. The only way you can win is to make bolder moves,
attacking your opponents’ weaknesses in an effort to deny them the
opportunity of solidifying their gains.

In Go, a handicap is used to balance games between players of
differing ability. The better player plays white and gives their
opponent enough extra stones to compensate for the difference in
ability. Black starts out with stones already placed at the key points
on the board. They start out a rich man, and their job is to safely and
simply hold onto everything they began the game with. White, matching
the asymmetry of our struggle, begins the game as a poor man who has no
choice but to pick quarrels.

Unfortunately for us, while our struggle is asymmetrical, it is not
because we are coming to the game with greater experience and natural
ability than our adversary. Still, in many ways, the powerful are slow
to respond to new tactics. Their strength is the stability of the
system they control. As marginal activists organizing from scratch, we
are approaching an opponent who is firmly entrenched, seemingly in
control of the whole board. Our task is to disrupt that stability and
expose weaknesses that give us further openings.

Conclusion
The game of Go is based on simple rules and is easy to learn, but as
you play and improve your skill, it becomes a complex game with great
depth of strategy. As 21st century Go players, we have easy
access to a wealth of information, built up from countless generations
of players, each generation building on the accomplishments of previous
generations and devising new patterns and styles of play.

Likewise, as anarchists we have much to learn from present and past
struggles, though we often lack in objectively evaluating past
strategies and devising new ones. Go gives us an opportunity to look at
strategy boiled down to its bare essence and to apply the lessons we
learn to our revolutionary praxis.

The Go proverbs and strategies mentioned above are just a beginning.
In print and online, there exists a wide variety of resources on Go
strategy, much of it useful for general strategic thinking. We can
combine these concepts with our practical experience and knowledge of
historical struggles to gain insights for practical strategy. As we
improve as Go players, we will continue to develop a strategic intuition
and a language and framework for analyzing real-world strategy.

ResourcesGo: An Introduction – by Andreas Fecke
A comic providing a simple introduction to the game of Go: hereThe Way to Go: How to play the Asian game of Go – by Karl Baker
A more thorough introduction to the game: here
A free 9×9 Go game – play against a computer: here
KGS Online Go Server – play against other people: here
Online Go problems: here
Go proverbs: here, here, here, here, and here

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